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(CANNES, France) Laurence Salfati has been a part of the Cannes Festival press corps for nearly twenty years. She works for Lyon-based Radio Judaica and has interviewed all of France's greatest film stars. René Chiche has been coming to Cannes for about as long as his aforementioned colleague. Chiche is a writer, a TV producer and a journalist. He owns a news agency that's based in Paris and runs ... more >

The town of Roubaix in France, located near the Belgian border, is rather like the Detroit of France. Yesterday’s city of industry has become a broken shell of a town.
In the film's opening as local police chief Inspector Daoud (Roschdy Zem) cruises by a burning car he calls it in, the fire foreshadowing tragedy.
Daoud is a fictional character who was added in by director Arnaud Desplechin. His ... more >

Matthias and Maxime have been friends since childhood. Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas, in his second role for the big screen) tries to gain a foothold in the business world while Maxime makes a living as bartender, caring for his mother, a recovering addict.
The two young men give off slight reticence, an awkwardness, it becomes clear quickly that these two aren’t just involved in a ... more >

This year, there was a before- and an after-Tarantino Cannes Festival. Quentin Tarantino's new film “Once upon a time in Hollywood” was the marker. And it was also the most anticipated film of the 2019 festival. What a party! There is no other American auteur who can command the kinds of huge crowds like the ones seen yesterday in Cannes, when he and the cast walked the red carpet. The Croisette ... more >

“Parasite,” directed by Bong Joon-Ho, is a comedy that glistens with irony about an elaborate con. The covetous greed of the poor is pitted against the dull indulgence of the wealthy in a manichean duel for supremacy, to realistic effect. Will the world one day see an all-out war between the classes? Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vest movement, are those harbingers? These movements have come and ... more >

An exotic locale in beautiful Portugal, an unaffected and powerful performance by a star actress and existential worriment. This is what you can expect from “Frankie,” an ensemble film directed by Ira Sachs that’s asthmatic and lacks energy but fascinated me, nevertheless, because of its main actress Isabelle Huppert and her incredible on-screen presence.
Huppert is one of France’s biggest ... more >

It’d be understandable to want to interpret the new Dardenne Brothers movie as finger-pointing at the insidious and virulent strain of religiosity that’s going around the world right now, that is, Islamism. But enslavement, of the mind (to someone else’s viewpoint, a submission to a code of beliefs that’s toxic, that will make you do irrational things, like commit murder) and, more to the point, ... more >